2.6.1 Verifying the MD5 Checksum

After you have downloaded a MySQL package, you should make sure
that its MD5 checksum matches the one provided on the MySQL
download pages. Each package has an individual checksum that you
can verify against the package that you downloaded. The correct
MD5 checksum is listed on the downloads page for each MySQL
product, and you will compare it against the MD5 checksum of the
file (product) that you download.

Each operating system and setup offers its own version of tools
for checking the MD5 checksum. Typically the command is named
md5sum, or it may be named
md5, and some operating systems do not ship
it at all. On Linux, it is part of the GNU
Text Utilities package, which is available for a wide
range of platforms. You can also download the source code from
http://www.gnu.org/software/textutils/. If you
have OpenSSL installed, you can use the command openssl
md5 package_name instead. A
Windows implementation of the md5 command
line utility is available from
http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/.
winMd5Sum is a graphical MD5 checking tool
that can be obtained from
http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/winmd5sum.
Our Microsoft Windows examples will assume the name
md5.exe.

You should verify that the resulting checksum (the string of
hexadecimal digits) matches the one displayed on the download
page immediately below the respective package.

Note

Make sure to verify the checksum of the archive
file (for example, the .zip,
.tar.gz, or .msi
file) and not of the files that are contained inside of the
archive. In other words, verify the file before extracting its
contents.